I’ve been cogitating all week on the connection between war and the lust for land and the way we perceive people of other races and ethnicities.

What do governments or peoples do when they prepare to go to war against another nation or people? They try to make it seem justified, just like humans always do when they want their own way.

The drumbeat of war starts, with stories showing the negatives about the other side. Stories of how vicious, brutal, depraved, treacherous, uncivilized, and different the other is become part of the propaganda. The process of distorting the humanity of the other cranks up.

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States

To make it possible for soldiers to kill another human being takes that process. They cannot be seen as human, with families who love them, as people capable of humor, kindness, generosity, nobility, or love. Likewise, taking the land of another and exploiting them also requires dehumanizing them. So the names come. Chink. Gook. Jap. Wop. Dago. Nigger. Greaser. Raghead. And the labels: lazy, savage, greedy, shifty, scrawny, tricky, dirty.

Prosperity and success get equated with being superior. Poverty and being a victim are marks of inferiority in such a world view.

Repeating the names and slurs, having them reinforced by friends and colleagues, build a deep contempt for the other and a sense of their own superiority, a superiority that gives them a sense of entitlement, that imposing their will on others is justified. Many of the soldiers then are able to shoot another human being and kill or enslave them, and sometimes, too often, to commit atrocities in the process.

Post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers and suicidal tendencies have been linked in many circumstances to the guilt of killing others, especially when victims are innocent civilians or when soldiers bear guilt over their own brutality.

The continents and peoples most victimized by European conquest were on the receiving end of the names and slurs. The peoples of Africa, North and South America, China, and India were some targeted for conquest. The legacy of that history is that those same groups continue to a greater or lesser extent to have been saddled with the derogatory labels into perpetuity.

Literature and art certainly perpetuated the stereotypes. But with the advent of film and television, the stereotypes in the Eurocentrism that is so prevalent seem to have been invested with an even greater dark power.

As Robert Stam and Ella Shohat point out in a chapter written for Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (edited by D.T. Goldberg, 1994),

“Eurocentrism minimizes the West’s oppressive practices by regarding them as contingent, accidental, exceptional. Western colonialism, slave trading, and imperialism are not seen as fundamental causes of the West’s disproportionate power…Eurocentrism sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West; it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements – science, progress, humanism – but of the non-West in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined.”

Racism is the bitter legacy of the sins of our fathers, it appears. It won’t go away anytime soon. Not as long as we associate light and white with purity and goodness and darkness with sin and evil.

Even as I write this conclusion, my eyes land on my own words above and see that I actually used the words dark power to refer to evil. It makes me aware again of how being washed from birth to the present in this “cultural stew” creeps into our unconscious minds and permeates our thinking, even when we try to confront it.

It is so hard to recognize the truth of our own evil, so easy for us to justify and excuse ourselves – all the while judging the sins of others. We don’t want to see our own actions or that of our government (or a President) as evil.

I have the conviction that the only way to ever free oneself from the racism, sexism, and other stereotypes of our society requires such focused awareness and such intense concentrated attention to guarding against the least trace.of bigotry that I despair of being able to fully achieve it. All I can do will be to try to catch my failures, repudiate them, and hope for help in rooting them out of my life.

I wish it were possible to be the person I want to be. But if I could, I wouldn’t need redemption and I wouldn’t have the blessing of experiencing unconditional love and forgiveness. After Maundy Thursday, there is Easter!

Raised in a liberal family (mom was a political activist, dad was a union organizer turned businessman) in the nineteen sixties, there was much in both my family and in the culture at large to shape my world view.

My parents were passionate about social justice and civil rights issues. We watched and discussed all the news about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. So, as much as one could while awash in a society in which racial stereotyping and prejudice is pervasive, I was raised to see Black Americans as real people.

That is despite the fact that my family had black maids to help with the cooking and cleaning for our large family. They were treated with dignity and respect, although not really as a part of the family. Class seemed a bit of a barrier more than did race – except that in America no one is ever free of having that as a part of the equation in any mixed race groups I suppose.

Issues of race and justice, prejudice and discrimination, were often topics around the dinner table and in the car. We were actively taught to treat people of other races well. The only time I ever was spanked for using a bad word was when I came home from a neighborhood friend’s house talking about her new doll, her “nigger baby.” I’m not sure I had a clue when I used the term that she called the doll that because it was black, and I just used the term because she had. I must have been around four or five years old at the time.

Nevertheless…my brother and I played cowboys and Indians with other kids in the neighborhood every Saturday morning after the Lone Ranger show ended. Commonly used phrases about Chinese fire drills seeped into our vocabulary. We absorbed parental teachings about the danger of ever dating a black person each time my mom read about a lynching anywhere in the country.

The Mexican-American children in my classes wore clothes that were older and their body language (in my mind, anyway) seemed to separate us. I couldn’t name it at the time, but I think class, and maybe living in a culture as full of prejudice as ours, colored my attitude to thinking of them as not quite equal.

A book on prejudice that I read as a teenager made me realize it was very unlikely that I would be able to escape absorbing the prejudice in our culture. Sadly, I have not. But I’ve been on the lookout for those ideas and tried to root them out and ask forgiveness (in my heart, since the thoughts – fortunately – were never spoken aloud).

But as I read the chapter on racial stereotyping and prejudice and was reminded just how deep and wide  the sea of negative images are in our culture, I realized that I’ve glossed over and failed to catch the many times I unthinkingly said or thought something that was a stereotype. The sad thing is that I never stopped to consider the cumulative impact of all the many stereotypes on those who are black or Latino, Asian or Native American. I never let it come up into my consciousness.

When I’m very sleep deprived, I’ve caught myself making Chinese laundry jokes or some such. Seems sort of funny and harmless – but the chapter has me thinking. I realize that I seem to have been captured by the culture to a far greater extent than I was previously aware. Shame on me.

I begin to see how very hard it is to stay free of that stuff. It involves paying attention – and we are a distracted, busy society for the much part. Intentionality plus vigilance, setting a guard on myself in essence. A big job to catch and stop my participation in the culture when it spreads negative stereotypes and racism to some degree to just about all of us.

Whew! I wonder if I can keep that focus and root it out. I’m one of those excessively busy, distracted workaholics. But maybe with a little attention and practice, that will improve bit by bit. It’ll take practice to make it into a habit.

“Inventing the Cosmo Girl” hit me viscerally – and then reading much of Cosmopolitan for Latinas right after finishing the article, I confess that the most accurate description of my reaction is appalled. I am trying to tease out some of my thoughts from the midst of all the feelings.

One thought is how stultifying it would be to spend all of one’s time and energy trying to transform oneself to create an illusion of beauty and to use one’s sexuality to elicit gifts from dates, to always be on the lookout for a man from a higher class to “land.” The very opposite of women’s liberation, despite the sexual liberation (if one can call it that) in Helen Gurly Brown’s message.

As a self-described materialist, Brown had a transactional view of male-female relationships, it seems to me. Become eye-candy, create illusion, improve one’s techniques, one’s body, one’s attitude, and attempt to exchange the “beautiful phoniness” for “marrying up.”  Even advice on jettisoning the wrong man (working class) and going after men even if they are married in the pursuit of their goals for economic advancement..

Brown’s version of feminine upward mobility advised shortcuts. Personal agency and hard work, sure, to exercise and diet, to purchase various cosmetics, clothes, shoes, to become invaluable to male employers with the idea of making that more than just a working relationship. But rather than use education to gain skills to gain a high-paying job, through Cosmopolitan’s articles she promoted the idea that women should go to technical school just to get somewhat middle class service jobs (secretary, stenographer) so that they could have access to more men.

How is that different from prostitution, exactly?

It seems to me that it allowed women the mental distance to deny to themselves that that’s what they were doing.

It would be fascinating to read research that investigated how women who had bought into the Cosmo Girl approach to betterment in the 1970s and 1980s feel about their choices, their mates, and their lives in hindsight, and to find out divorce statistics for that group, measures of satisfaction and happiness now, and to compare the results for those with readers of Ms.

By advising women to focus on appearance in themselves and material gains, it seems to me that Brown pushed women to find mates obsessed with appearance. Were such mates more likely to dump them as they aged and their looks were no longer so sexy? More likely to cheat? More likely to discover they’d been manipulated into marriage and to develop resentment for the woman they married? Were those marriages less stable?

Phoniness is not a sound basis for work relationships, marriage relationships, or friendships. It paves the way to ever lower self-esteem. For Helen Gurley Brown to seduce millions of readers into following such a path, and taking advantage of their insecurity to gain riches and fame without any regard for the long-term consequences of her advice on those readers strikes me as immoral and revolting.

The feminist movement seems to me the more honest and hopeful one. By encouraging women’s sense of agency, empowering them to dream new dreams for their lives beyond cultural stereotypes, it fostered creativity and growth. That is real liberation, not the false one of Helen Gurly Brown’s Cosmo Girl.

Knowing something in theory is different from knowing the details and specifics. As an involved citizen who pays close attention to media and issues of media policy, and someone who has been blessed to get to attend three of the National Conferences on Media Reform, I felt more knowledgeable than most on issues of gender and race and the impact on America both for members of minorities and for the dominant culture.

Nevertheless, the details of research into the actual situation of news coverage of minorities over time managed to engender some surprise and the feeling that it is even worse than I knew.

In a 1995 study on the average number of column inches devoted to any member of four minority groups (blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian Americans) over a 60 year period in the New York Times, which has styled itself as the nation’s “paper of record” revealed wide disparities between the amount of coverage of each group even in modern times. Blacks made the greatest gains in column inches, but for Latinos and other groups the gap in coverage compared to that of blacks was wider than their percentage of the population would lead one to expect.

It’s sad the extent to which the white mainstream press in the U.S. still has a significant tendency to report on minorities “as outside the American system…as people who either have problems or cause problems for society.” (Carolyn Martindale).

That’s true even though many of those groups predate the arrival of the Irish, Italians, and other previously discriminated against groups that have long since melted into the pot and assimilated.

The antidote for the issue is detailed in the section of the reading by William Wong: good reporting, precise writing, doing your homework so that you have a knowledge of cultural traditions, histories, and experiences.

The pressures of journalism have always involved the intensity of deadlines shaping the reporters’ choices. In the era of shrinking newsrooms, where the number of reporters work for media conglomerates is being slashed and each one is now responsible for filing stories for print, radio, TV, and multimedia and may well have to publicize those stories through Twitter and Facebook, current reporting reality inevitably seems to crowd out time for much good reporting.

Too often old stereotypes and unsupported assertions still stir up negativity with a callous disregard for reality and for the impact of the misinformation on readers and listeners. Glenn Beck, anyone?